Kawai Strong Washburn

Kawai Strong Washburn does not want to do this interview on Friday, even though it makes more sense planning-wise. The author won’t admit it, but I think he’s scared… of snow.

“Friday could work as a meeting time,” he’d conceded over email. “But given there’s heavy snow in the forecast, traffic could be bad. Tomorrow would be ideal.”

Washburn, 39, is a native of the Big Island of Hawaii. And while he’s lived lots of other places since coming to the mainland after high school—Portland, D.C., and San Fran among them—the frozen tundra was something else.

And yet, here he is, inside a climbing gym that used to be an actual ice warehouse (Vertical Endeavors on Minneapolis’s Eat Street) on a midwinter Thursday, with temps well below zero. It might not be snowing, but it sure ain’t Hawaii.

While doing this interview Thursday was Washburn’s idea, meeting at the climbing gym was mine. One of the central characters in his debut novel, Sharks in the Time of Saviors, climbs as a form of spiritual release. A handful of different voices narrate the story, a blue-collar family epic with a dose of magical realism, set in Hawaii. And the climber’s descriptions are vivid enough that I have a hunch Washburn probably knows the difference between a triple-lock and straight-gate carabiner.

I suggested Vertical Endeavors, where, as fate would have it, Washburn holds a membership. It’s a fact you’d know even if you saw him at the grocery store: His lean, strong frame carries technical Patagonia threads as though they were tailored just for him. I watch the novelist as he easily glides through advanced climbs—fingertips deftly supporting his weight as his body moves from one nubbin of a hold to the seemingly impossible next nubbin. When it’s my turn, I fumble just to make it halfway up walls that might as well be stepladders. Back on equal footing—that is, the rubbery ground—we talk about stuff like the ingredients of the great Hawaiian novel.

But first, I have to find out more about the Big Island native’s move to a state whose own Big Island is altogether less worthy of a book.

You’re a newly minted Northerner.

We got here in June.

Why would a San Fran-by-way-of-Hawaii guy think moving to Minneapolis was a good idea?

There were a couple things, actually. One was fires. The three and a half years we were living in the Bay Area, the fires got worse. And it just felt like that state was going under. It felt apocalyptic.

I was working on revisions of the novel and up really early in the morning when the Camp Fire hit. We were hundreds of miles away from it in San Carlos, on the peninsula. But I thought that the forest around us was on fire, because I smelled it so strongly. Within a couple days, we were wearing respiratory masks all around.

Photo by Caitlin Abrams

Sharks in the Time of Sailors

They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but clearly they’re wrong.

So, you sought refuge in the land of ice and snow.

My wife really wanted to move back here. She’s from Stillwater.

Ah! It wasn’t just a throw-a-dart-at-a-map thing, then.

No, no, no, no. And that is also just to say that we’ve been back here for a lot of the winters. Most winter breaks over the last four years, we’ve been out here. So, we’ve experienced the polar vortex before.

You took a fairly nontraditional path to becoming a writer, too.

I studied tech as an undergrad. But I got out of college in 2002 when the dot-com bubble had just burst, and I’d spent enough time in my community to see how severe the income disparities were. So I really felt like it was important to find something else to do, rather than write printer drivers for Tektronix or something. I was a volunteer teacher overseas, I worked for a social service agency in Guatemala for a while, and I taught at an alternative high school in Portland.

Then I ended up moving to New York for grad school to do policy work. So, most of my 20s and early 30s were spent doing volunteer work and policy work, and that took me to D.C. And I met my wife in D.C. We worked at an NGO and shared an office.

I perceive echoes of your early career—as well as what you were witnessing in your life, like the real-time effects of climate change—in Sharks in the Time of Saviors.

I think it’s impossible to completely divorce yourself from your writing. Certainly, talking about the unsustainable current trajectory of people’s relationship with the natural world. And that there was a time when you didn’t have the luxury to just tear up the world because your survival was so closely tied to being able to exist within it. And that that’s the sort of thing indigenous cultures had a better grasp of.

There remain, to this day, elements of native Hawaiian culture that think about the natural world very differently than modern America does. So that was something I wanted to speak on.

You undermine the mainlander idea of what and who Hawaii is.

Yeah. Yeah. And some of the things I talk about in the book. There’s been a strong revival of native Hawaiian traditions and values. And the culture as a whole is going through this really important resurgence. And one of the ways that is happening is that there are a lot of people who are building these traditional collective farms. It is reimagining itself in the context of late modern America and the failures of capitalism for a place like Hawaii.

There aren’t many parallels between the Midwest and Hawaii. But the recent revival of a sort of folksy agrarianism does feel similar.

Yeah. Those are things that really started to resonate with me as I wrote it. And those are the things that made me excited to make it a viable novel.

What’s your Sharks elevator pitch?

I would say it’s a family epic about a blue-collar family in Hawaii that is struggling to understand the meaning of this miraculous event that occurs and what that means for both the family itself and each of the children themselves—uh, if you could just rewind that. That’s a really shitty version of that, actually.

It happens.

To me, the book ended up being about examining the ideas of faith and hope. And what people tell themselves about other people when they’re suffering or feeling pain and trying to tell themselves there’s an escape from it.

When people talk about dramatic social change or inflection points in history, they always ascribe it to a specific individual. When, in reality, the most change that has happened in the world has happened when a groundswell of decisions were made by a large number of generally unnamed people.

This is your first novel, and aside from the occasional lit journal story, you haven’t been all that widely published. And yet, when Sharks first got shopped around, there was a bidding war. Crazy!

That was completely unexpected. The things that attracted people to it were the setting and just the world more generally of that place, Hawaii. And the people that were of that place, taken together with their voices, give you this whole world that I think people hadn’t quite experienced.

Photo courtesy Washburn

Kawai Strong Washburn's Family

The Washburns wear the warmest clothes they owned before moving to Minnesota.

Kawai Strong Washburn: first writer of Hawaiian fiction?

Ha. There are other writers out there who are from Hawaii, and who have written with Pidgin slang. So this wasn’t the first book that had those elements. But it was the first one in a while. And it feels like a unique world.

And other things like that magical realism that was there, and the fact that it does hint at its edges and asks questions about capitalism and what’s happening in America right now. How people are struggling economically, and yet there’s this idea that this is supposed to be the land of opportunity.

The magical realism is funny because even once I finished the book, I wasn’t sure if it was actually there.

I wanted to leave that up to the reader. I wanted those things to feel like they could happen in the real world. And one of the reasons I wanted to do that is because that feeling still exists in Hawaii. Within the culture, people will talk about things like Menehune—these little impish creatures who, like, when you lose your keys, you say took them.

Faithfully rendering native cultures can be tricky for writers, even when the writer is a part of the culture.

I was concerned about that and remain concerned about it. It’s tricky. I thought, like, a couple hundred people are going to read it or whatever. Even if it does come out, it’s going to come out on some small press. So, I didn’t think it was going to get the sort of attention it did. And then it did, and I was like, “Oh. Shit. Now I’m scared.”

Haha.

And it’s gotten far enough already that my publisher’s already gotten comments from a native-Hawaiian PhD, longtime scholar at the University of Hawaii. And I was like, “Oh, fuck.”

Again: It’s tricky.

I was trying to stay as true as possible to the interiority of the characters. I knew a lot more about native Hawaiian history and mythology, but the characters couldn’t know those things, because it wouldn’t be truthful to who they were. And I didn’t want it to be an instruction manual on Hawaii or an encyclopedia of Hawaii.

So, Sharks is categorically not the definitive great Hawaiian novel then?

No. Ha. No, there’s no way. Yeah, that’s not—

—not what you set out to write, eh?

Yeah, I don’t think I read too many of those books. I don’t know.

What does your family on the Big Island think of the book?

My family back home hasn’t read it. Nobody in my family has.

But your wife has, right?

Nope. No.

Not even a little bit?! Oh, you’re going to squirm when she reads it, though.

Probably. But, actually, my wife and I read together out loud at night. Before we go to bed, we take turns reading a book out loud.

Wait. Like with your kids?

No. Just us.

Oh. Wow.

It’s great! You should try it! It’s such a gift to read out loud to somebody else. We read all sorts of things.

Including Sharks in the Time of Saviors?

I know my wife’s going to want to read this out loud together.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Our deputy editor and generalist extraordinaire has been around the block with stints at Thrillist, Metro, and Minnesota Business to name a few. He lives in Tangletown with his wife and kids, and would almost always rather be wearing a baseball cap.

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